Solo Transcription - Philly Joe Jones, "Two Bass Hit" (again)

Here's another take on Philly Joe's solo on "Two Bass Hit".  The best known version, of course, comes from Miles Davis' 1958 album Milestones, which is arguably the pinnacle of his first great quintet (though by this point it was a sextet with Cannonball).  But just over a year later, Philly Joe released Philly Joe's Beat under his own name, and re-recorded "Two Bass Hit" with a different band.  Some of the vocabulary in the head is similar and at times even identical to the Milestones recording, but the famous drum break just before the solo section is markedly different, despite containing plenty of Philly Joe-isms.  As usual, stickings are my best guess and what I would likely play, but do with it what you will.

Philly Joe three beat triplet phrase, alternate stickings

Awhile back I posted about a common Philly Joe phrase in which he plays three beats worth of triplets in this sticking.

It is a really common phrase of his, and even cursory listening should turn up plenty examples of it.  One of the best known examples of it is the last few bars of his solo on “Two Bass Hit”, from Milestones.

I also turn it around sometimes, putting the paradiddle-diddle first.  In this case you’ll have to play RRL at the end instead of RLL.

 

But you’re also likely to hear Philly Joe do another group of three triplets with a different sticking.  You can tell the difference by the rhythmic melody it creates.  Philly Joe played a lot of 6-stroke rolls.  In this sticking he plays a 6-stroke roll with an extra RLL at the end.  This is another nice one to have in your back pocket and sounds nice as you move it around the kit.

I also like sticking an extra RRL at the end instead

 

And, of course, you could revisit the original post for ideas on how to launch into it.

Solo Transcription - Kenny Washington, "Where Have You Been?"

I'm getting ready to move next month and have been clearing out some boxes.  In the process I found an old notebook that I had completely forgotten about with a handful of transcriptions that I did by hand many moons ago.  Over the coming weeks I'm going to digitize them all and post them here.

 

The first one clearly comes from early on in my period of digging into Kenny Washington as it's from the first album I ever heard with Kenny on it; Bill Charlap's Written in the Stars.

 

 

Solo Transcription - Philly Joe Jones, "Two Bass Hit"

I realize there's already quite a few of transcriptions of this one floating around the internet, but for one, I just wanted to do it myself, and two, I think some of them have mistakes or are missing details.  I'm not claiming to be the world's leading expert on Philly Joe, but I've probably listened to his playing more than any other drummer of that era, and I like to think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on in this solo.

The six-stroke rolls at the beginning are a common Philly Joe sound, but we can't really attribute a rudiment like that to one drummer alone.  The most notable and recognizable phrase that is uniquely Philly Joe is the three beat, RLL RLR RLL triplet phrase, as well as the single stroke R LRL that often precedes it.  It appears in measures 3, 11, and the entire last line.  I did a whole post on this with some exercises for developing it a few years ago.

 

I'm not entirely sure about the stickings in measures 7-10, but that's my best guess based on other things I've heard and videos I've seen.

Philly Joe Jones three-beat triplet phrase

If you dig in to Philly Joe, you'll hear this signature phrase come up a lot.  It's simply three triplets, often played more than once so it rolls over the bar, with an accent on the first note of the first triplet each time.

You could, of course, simply play this as single strokes with no problem.  But it is generally accepted that Philly Joe played it R L L, followed by a paradiddle-diddle, like so:

To my knowledge, Philly Joe played it primarily (maybe even exclusively) off the right hand as notated above.  But we never miss a chance to create an exercise and work on something in both directions.  So, to get familiar with it try releasing with a quarter note and then starting with the left, back and forth:

Once it feels comfortable play it multiple times in a row on each hand until it resolves, and then again, flip it to the other side.

If you're practicing this on the kit, with the hi-hat on 2 and 4, it would be worth shifting the whole by a beat as well to experiment with different placements.

Another thing that Philly Joe would do with this lick is launch into with another single stroke triplet, preceded by an accent eighth note.  Again, try this leading both left and right.

And, again, shift that by a beat for more options.

As always, drop my an e-mail if you would like a copy of all of this on a neatly organized PDF

Solo transcription - Andy Kravitz, "St. Teresa"

This is one of the first solos that taught me about subtlety.

In high school, my private teacher at the time suggested I check out Joan Osborne's album Relish.  I was skeptical because as a hard rock loving teenager I thought "One of Us", the hit single from that album, was stupid.  But, as he had yet to lead me astray, I nonetheless used my allowance money to pick up a copy of the album which I found was indeed very good.

One of the main reasons he suggested the album was because one or two tunes feature Omar Hakim, and the rest of the album has drummer/producer Andy Kravitz behind the kit.  Kravitz has worked with a wide array of artists that you'll especially remember from the 90s like Juliana Hatfield, Cypress Hill, Spearhead, and Urge Overkill, as well as with bigger names like Billy Joel and The Rolling Stones. 

Another one of the singles from Relish, "St. Teresa" has an understated solo at the end.  I still remember thinking how crazy it was that he wasn't playing all that many notes but it was still really cool.  The bass drum and rim click were coming in unexpected places to great effect.

This popped into my head the other day, so I put it on and realized I still remembered the solo note for note, so I figured I'd quickly jot it down and share it with you.  Solo starts around 4:30.

Carmen Intorre solo transcription

I first heard Carmen Intorre play in 2012 at Ronnie Scott's with Pat Martino.  The whole band were crushing that evening.  I had long been wanting to do an organ trio record myself, and that show put the spark under my ass to finally do it.  I was so inspired by it that I even called Pat Bianchi to do the record, which you can check out in the menu on the right.

Anyway, with the recent passing Pat Martino I've been revisiting a bunch of his records, and in listening to his final record, "Formidable", got to thinking again about that evening at Ronnie's and the great teamwork of Bianchi and Intorre.

I was reminded of this video I saw back in 2014 when looking for a studio to do my record.  It's a promo video for guitarist Alessandro Florio, and features a very nicely constructed solo by Carmen.  I was always struck by how relaxed Carmen was and how naturally he made his way around the kit and flowed from one idea to the other.

Transcription - Charlie Smith, "Hot House"

This is one I've been meaning to do for a long time.  Years, really.  I remember the first time I saw this video in college, and was struck by a few things.  For one, I don't know that I had seen a left-handed jazz drummer before then.  Also, the band seemed like an unlikely bunch.  For one, I was surprised not to see Max Roach on drums, and two the bassist, who is named Sandy Block, seemed kind of old for that crew.  And the pianist is Dick Hyman, who was also a host of the television show that this performance was on.

The drummer is Charlie Smith.  His name isn't thrown around as often as the likes of Kenny Clarke or Max Roack, but he had an enviable career working for the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Oscar Peterson, and more.

I love Charlie's feel on this tune, and the minimal set up with the jumbo bass drum.

Solo Transcription - Gaylord Birch, "Yes We Can Can" live

Following on from the first Gaylord Birch post the other day, here is a live version of the same tune where he gets more of a feature.  This is my kind of drum solo.  Just a kick-ass groove that everyone can still dance to with some bells and whistles thrown in for pizzazz.  I love the way that old kit shakes as he plays the living crap out of it, and that backhanded crash at 3:22 gets me every time.

Solo starts around 3:02, but you should just listen to the whole thing

Philly Joe Jones - The Tympany Cross

Throughout the Covid era, the Drummer's Collective have been offering online workshops with some fantastic guests, including Jeff "Tain" Watts and, most recently, John Riley.  For me, one of the highlights of the evening was when John shared with us an exercise developed by Philly Joe Jones using the ubiquitous Saul Goodman timpani book.  Not only is it a neat little exercise, but it was in Philly Joe's own handwriting from his stint in London.

The gist of the exercise is that Philly Joe simply took some of the crossover exercises from Saul Goodman's Modern Method for Tympani and applied to the drumset.  The book is a staple of percussion study and has been used by countless students since it was first published in 1948.  I still have my copy sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere from the last time I played timpani, which was probably 15 years ago or more, so I might just have to pull it out and get some use out of it again.

Unaccompanied Solo - Edu Ribeiro, "Diddle Diddle"

Continuing on with another unaccompanied solo, this time by Edu Ribeiro.  This piece comes from Edu's 2017 album Na Calada do Dia.

A few weeks ago I started to transcribe it and by strange coincidence the next day I received an e-mail from Edu's mailing list which contained a download link to a PDF of the solo. But I decided to carry on with my transcription, anyway, as the recording has a few small differences to the score, which is also lacking some of the articulations heard in the recording.  Also, the stickings are written using D's and E's, the common way in Brazilian Portuguese.

So, here's my version of it.  If you'd like the original from Edu himself head over to his website, and sign up for his mailing list.

Kenny Washington Unaccompanied Solo

To the best of my knowledge there's not a whole lot of literature out there for unaccompanied solo drum set.  Admittedly I've never looked that hard as I've not often had the need for it, but prior to lockdown I had a student whose school music teacher was often asking to hear unaccompanied solos.  So we did Max Roach's "The Drum Also Waltzes", some variations on Nate Smith's "Pocket Change", and she wrote some material of her own.  And then I quickly started to run out of suggestions, or at least suggestions that I thought were cool enough to be worth spending our lesson time on.

Enter Kenny Washington.  I know the term "musical drummer" gets thrown around far too much these days, but I'm going to use it anyway here to refer to Kenny.  Even when he is demoing a drum set as he is in the video below, Kenny is always making music, as opposed to simply ramming notes.  There's always a clear shape, structure, and purpose to his playing, which I really appreciate and enjoy.  The end result is that those drum demos end up sounding very much like an unaccompanied drum solo that might actually be worth performing, so I've taken the liberty of transcribing it.

Now, for over six years, That Drum Blog has been full of free content for everyone to enjoy and learn from, and that's not going to change.  But, in addition to all of the free content that I will continue to provide, I will also be posting some larger, more detailed projects for you to purchase, this Kenny Washington solo being one of them.

In the coming days there will be payment links set up for automated instant downloads, but until I get all that infrastructure in place we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way.  If you'd like a PDF of the solo below please send $3 via PayPal to adamosmianski@hotmail.com and I'll get you a copy within 24 hours.

Solo Transcription - Stan Levey, "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To"

My buddy, Pedro Velasco, from Machimbombo, has been posting a lot of transcription videos lately and asked me to collaborate with him on one.

Here's Stan Levey and Lee Konitz trading fours on "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To", from the album Originalee Konitz.

Kenny Washington Inverted Roll

Here's a quick little phrase that I've been playing for years, but for some reason never thought to share with you wonderful people.  It's an idea I got from Kenny Washington that is built on an inverted roll.

An inverted roll is simply a roll in which the first note of each double stroke is on the "&", rather than the downbeat.  So, instead of: RRLL RRLL....  you'd play RLLR RLLR

Kenny, however, leaves off that single note on the downbeat and simply starts straight in with the double strokes on the & of 1, which gives the whole thing a nice kick.  It's worth trying it in different parts of the bar, as well as different parts of the phrase, though it works particularly well on the & of 1, and the & of 2.

I'm toying with the idea of tying the blog into YouTube a little bit more, so there is a video down below demonstrating this idea.

Ratamacues Around the Drums

Time to put those rudiments back to work.  Many of the jazz greats used/use the ratamacue as a fill around the kit, so let's do a bit of it ourselves.

Philly Joe Jones comes to mind in particular when I think of this:

And I've heard Jeff Hamilton turn this around and come up the drums, playing the grace notes on the bass drum, like so:

Philly Joe and Jeff Hamilton generally play both of these in a closed interpretation, meaning they are playing a true ruff which comes just before the primary note, not in any specific time.  But as we've discussed before on the blog, these rudiments can also be played with an open interpretation wherein the grace notes become measured, and are played on the note prior to the primary note.  So this....

....becomes this:

Putting this open interpretation on the kit gives us something similar, but with a different vibe to it.

If we take this one step further we may be pushing the boundaries of what a ratamacue truly is, as it's now closer to being a double paradiddle, but we can get a whole series of new ideas nonetheless by playing the grace notes (which sort of cease to be grace notes) on the two 8th notes prior to the primary note as opposed to the two 16th notes before it.  I recently saw Edu Ribeiro playing an idea like this, and brighter tempos it sounds very cool.

And finally, with everything now being evenly spaced it frees us up to move the idea more freely throughout the bar.

Here is everything above neatly organized into one sheet.  Drop me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF.

Applying the Rudiments - 5-Stroke Roll

I find one of the biggest disconnects with younger/less experienced players is between rudiments and actual music.  So often they're told, "You need to learn your rudiments!", but not why they should learn the rudiments, or how to actively apply them to music making.

So, let's start with a pretty basic applications in a straight ahead sort of style, first by playing the 5-stroke roll as it's often notated in books:

Next, trade fours with yourself, preferably with a metronome, or better yet, a record.  Four bars of time, and four bars of 5-stroke roll as written above.  For now keep your feet going while you "solo", like so:

There are infinite possibilities here when it comes to orchestration, but if this concept is new to you or your student let's just start by keeping all the double strokes on the snare and moving the single strokes to the toms; right hand to the floor tom, left hand to the mounted tom:

One of the things with rudiments that I don't think is immediately obvious to students is the idea of permutation.  Keep in mind that a 5-stroke roll is just that - five strokes; two double strokes and a single stroke.  There's nothing to say that it has to be played exactly as written above.  We can start it anywhere in the bar to create new rhythmic ideas.  With that in mind, try starting with the single stroke, and also starting on the upbeats.  For the sake of clarity I've left out the bass drum and hi-hat notation, but I'd still recommend keeping them in for now.

Let's play the single strokes as an eighth note rather than a quarter note for a longer phrase.  This will create a hemiola that will naturally resolve after three bars.  Try playing these in both four and eight bar phrases.  For four bar phrases you'll play measures 1, 2 and 3, and then measure 1 again.

And lastly (for now) turn the whole thing into triplets:

The examples here are just the tip of the iceberg as the possibilities really are endless.  Of course I recommend you put in your Wilcoxon time, and if you really want to go deeper into this stuff check out Joe Morello's book Rudimental Jazz.

Here's the whole sheet laid out.  Please feel free to get in touch if you'd like a PDF copy.

Mel Lewis' "Rub-a-Dub"

Full disclosure: this is a re-blog of a re-blog, so I'm taking no credit here.  I was over at Cruise Ship Drummer! as I often am, where Todd was developing some ideas based on a post by Chris Smith about Mel Lewis' "Rub-a-Dub" lick.

As a pretty big fan of Mel's playing I'm ashamed to say that I had never heard the name "Rub-a-Dub".  I immediately recognized the sound and concept when I heard it, but I didn't realize that Mel had given it a little onomatopoeic name.  It's a pretty simple concept, and a clever way of seamlessly making ensemble hits be it in a big band setting or over a solo vamp.  When done right, it sits in this beautiful space where it's busier than general time keeping, but isn't full-on Buddy Rich.  It's the best of both worlds, and depending on how you play it you can lean more heavily to one side that the other.

The other beauty of it is that although it is born from a pretty specific style, the idea is extremely applicable to other ways of playing.  Straighten out the 8th notes, and you're well on your way to a very cool ECM sort of sound for starters.  Anyway....

The basic sticking looks like so:

LRR = Rub a Dub

Voiced on the kit, keep the left hand on the snare and the right on the ride cymbal (at least to start).  This is what allows it to feel simultaneously like time playing and soloing.

The first of each right hand is also played on the bass drum.  This is where most of the hits should fall.

From there, you can start moving the left hand, or the second right around the kit.

Chris gives a far better explanation of it than I have, and he plays some great examples, so be sure to check out his video, as well as Todd's posts taking it a few steps further.  Chris wrote out the ideas on his blog, but I knocked them into Sibelius so I could print it out for some of my students who will really benefit from it.  I am, of course, happy to send anyone a copy if interested.  Just drop me an e-mail.

Definitely check out the rest of Chris' "The Drum Hang".  It's a brand new blog - only seven posts so far - but he's putting out content pretty consistently and it's all great stuff.

Permutations of a Bill Stewart fill

If you're a Bill Stewart fan then you almost certainly recognize this lick...

It pops up quite a lot in Bill's playing.  The placement of the bass drum seems to change from time to time.  Maybe it's a tempo thing or maybe just a personal choice.  Either way it's worth trying all three versions.

I was playing around with this phrase recently and started moving it around the bar, and inverting it, ending up with ideas like this....

Just by shifting everything by an 8th note we can get three very different feeling phrases.  Place the bass drum in all three places for each permutation and all of a sudden we've got 9 different phrases to play around with.

By playing 16th notes instead of triplets we can take this one step farther....

We now have a three beat phrase, which works well in 3/4, or perhaps even more so, as a hemiola idea that moves over the bar line.

Send me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF page of all the combinations.